But the coat--the blue coat with brass buttons, with the straps of a lieutenant on the shoulders, was mended and even in that same summer did active service many times. For that was a busy summer for Sycamore Ridge, and holidays came faster than the months. When the supreme court decided the Minneola suit to enjoin the building of the court-house, in favour of Syeamore Ridge, there was another holiday, and men drew John Barclay around in the new hack with the top down, and there were fireworks in the evening. For it was John Barclay's lawsuit. Lige Bemis, who was county attorney, did not try to claim credit for the work, and when the last acre of the great wheat crop of the Golden Belt Wheat Company was cut, and threshed, there was a big celebration and the elevator of the Golden Belt Wheat Company was formally turned over to the company, and John Barclay was the hero of another happy occasion. For the elevator, standing on a switch by the railroad track, was his "proposition." And every one in town knew that the railroad company had made a rate of wheat to Barclay and his associates, so low that Minneola could not compete, even if she hauled her wheat to another station on the road, so Minneola teams lined up at Barclay's elevator. That autumn Minneola, without a railroad, without a chance for the county-seat, and without a grain market, began to fag, and during the last of September, the Mason House came moving out over the hill road, from Minneola to Sycamore Ridge, surrounded by a great crowd of enthusiastic men from the Ridge. Every evening, of the two weeks in which the house was moving, people drove out from Sycamore Ridge to see it, and Lycurgus Mason, sitting on the back step smoking,--he could not get into the habit of using the front steps even in his day of triumph,--was a person of considerable importance. Money was plentiful, and the Exchange National Bank grew with the country. The procession of covered wagons, that had straggled and failed the year before, began to close ranks in the spring; and in place of "Buck" and "Ball" and "Star," and "Bright" and "Tom" and "Jerry," who used to groan under the yoke, horses were hitched to the wagons, and stock followed after them, and thus Garrison County was settled, and Sycamore Ridge grew from three to five thousand people in three years. In the spring of '75 the _Banner_ began to publish a daily edition, and Editor Brownwell went up and down the railroad on his pass, attending conventions and making himself a familiar figure in the state. Times were so prosperous that the people lost interest in the crime of '73, and General Ward had to stay in his law-office, but he joined the teetotalers and helped to organize the Good Templars and the state temperance society. Colonel Culpepper in his prosperity took to fancy vests, cut extremely low, and the Culpepper women became the nucleus of organized polite society in the Ridge.